How To: Win Defense Pork — or Lobby for a Dictator

Muckraker extraordinaire Ken Silverstein’s new book, Turkmeniscam, begins with a devilishly simple premise: pose as a defense contractor and, with the aid of a high-powered lobbying firm, insert a pork-barrel spending project into a defense spending bill. The plan:

[C]reate a fake company, which would have a business address in the Virginia suburbs near Washington, an area that is home to thousands of small defense contractors. I selected for my firm the nondescript name of ACR Engineering, whose initials could stand for either Advanced Communications Research or Astonishing Congressional Rip-off. The latter seemed more apt in this case.

The next step, he writes, would be to lobby a member of one of the congressional appropriations committees to earmark funds for an ACR project. Silverstein’s fake firm would peddle bogus counter-IED technology:

In late 2003, the Pentagon established an IED (improvised explosive devices) task force, with a $3 billion budget, that was charged with researching and developing projects to reduce the toll from IEDs used by insurgent groups. With a Pentagon honeypot this size, it was inevitable that a number of companies were seeking to cash in with products of little merit.

For DANGER ROOM readers, that story should sound familiar. Unfortunately, Silverstein abandons his original plan; the lobbyist’s fee could run $6,000 a month or more. And while Silverstein never intends to take the earmarked money after it is inserted in the defense budget, he notes, "deceitfully seeking money for a genuinely important cause raised ethical issues and there were some fairly serious legal issues involved as well."

Um, yeah.

Silverstein then opts for Plan B: Posing as a representative of the Stalinist regime of Turkmenistan and seeing who lines up to help re-brand the dictatorship in Washington. If you haven’t read the Harper’s article (or heard Silverstein on the radio), buy this book, now. As Silverstein discovers, powerful lobbying firms were more than happy to flack for Turkmenistan, for a price.